Eau Claire Wisconsin Real Estate Blog: Looking for some sizzle in your “virtual tours”? Shock and Awe with Animoto and Photosynth

Recently I have been talking a lot about video. I like video. It’s a great format. It’s engaging. Everything about it is great. But making videos of listings is troublesome at best and a nightmare for most people. Editing raw video footage requires some computer processing power and it takes time. Even just putting some clips in order and making it look seamless isn’t as easy as it seems. But there are alternatives that are equally impressive.

I have two different applications that I have been working with lately that are just incredible. In the past I have used Slide.com and I liked it. It’s good but it’s not animoto.com. I don’t know what it is but Animoto is simply amazing. It only takes a few minutes to make a “video” and the results are impressive.

Take a look at some Animoto clips below. Notice it says YouTube?

You see that’s the other thing I like about Animoto. Once you have your clip made you can convert it to a YouTube video at the press of a button. After that you can tweak the title and other SEO components and you have yourself some SEO FIRE. You have several options available through Animoto itself as well. You can send the clip to a zillion different social networking applications as well as Tweet the video!  I just sent out a tweet of my clip for a listing at the click of a button. There is nothing easier than this. I am not going to do a step by step to show you because it’s so simple you don’t really need directions. In minutes you have a slideshow created. One word of caution, it allows you to upload mp3s. This is a huge copyright issue waiting to happen. You don’t have commercial rights to use those songs regardless if they are your favorites, just use the ones that they have available if you like music.

The other dazzler that I came across is the Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth. This thing is amazing as well. The potential here is staggering. I know virtual tour companies that charge hundreds of dollars to create something similar to this. You also have to wait several days for them to “process” the video as well as wait for them to send out a photographer. That’s fine and dandy if you can do all this weeks in advance of a listing but when I list a house I want this stuff online THAT DAY! And now you can and you can do it for free.

What this does is take pictures and seamlessly puts them together. How it does it I don’t know or care really just that it works. Call it magic if you will. The only trick is to take dozens and dozens of pictures. You want to take them from as many angles as possible and think in your mind of seaming them up. So don’t take a picture of the front and then one of the back of the house thinking it’s going to fill in the space. You need to follow around the house and fill in the gaps. With neighbors houses this is a bit trickier so it can get jumpy but the better you can do it the better your synth will turn out.

The one I added below is a recent listing that is currently on hold until the inside is finished. For now I wanted to create some hype about the listing so I used Photosynth to create a virtual tour of the outside. It’s on a golf course so I was able to show off the yard and the course as well. You will notice a few gaps as I pointed out above how to avoid that. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about it because of the layout. Anyways as you can see the results are pretty good. The trick as I said above is to take a lot of pictures and try to stitch them together in your mind. This makes it easier later and gets rid of the gaps.

Doing the inside is the same as the outside expect in reverse. The outside was taken from vantage points outside the home pointing in (except the golf course which was pointing out). For the inside just stand in the middle and shoot around you in 360. It works by using the vantage points and tries to see where the camera was when the pictures were taken. So if you can imagine that it might make it easier to do.

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